Waugh was one of the most confessedly autobiographical of writers. All his novels — with the exception of Helena, perhaps — are rooted in his own experiences, even the most exuberant and grotesque comedies. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and The Sword of Honour trilogy are particularly good examples of this tendency, but the life/art nexus is strongly present in all his novels. Novelists of this sort do not necessarily possess the fingernail-paring artistic objectivity of a Joyce or Nabokov. Themes and leitmotifs, images and metaphors tend to emerge more unconsciously with this category of writer. That Waugh wrote so quickly also testifies to something subconscious and instinctive in his art rather than highly planned and artistically organized. True, there are repeated themes in A Handful of Dust that appear to run coherently through it — lists of objects that define a character, images of beasts and animals, for example; the idea of the celestial city, of Gothic fantasy and romance — but such synthesis is not the overriding impression the novel conveys, I would claim. On the contrary, A Handful of Dust, structurally speaking, is highly variable, not to say disorganized, and the machinery of the novel — its nuts and bolts, its pulleys and levers — suggests, when analysed, something altogether more inchoate and thrown together.
Take the question of point of view, for example. The narrative voice is omniscient: namely, the author is at liberty to enter any character’s mind and tell us, the readers, what he or she is thinking. Godlike, the author can flit here and there, and present the novel’s world in all its objectivity or subjectivity as he pleases. As the twentieth century moved on, omniscient narration became less and less favoured, or else was used with deliberate knowingness. It was the most popular narrative method of the great Victorian novelists and, surprisingly, A Handful of Dust sounds at times very Victorian in its use of omniscience. Waugh does not hesitate to employ what we might call the Dickensian apostrophe: a moment in the text when all suspension of disbelief is cast aside and the novelist addresses the reader in his own voice. For a book regarded as bleakly modern it is in places creakingly antique. Waugh favours the use of the bracketed aside quite frequently. For example, early in the novel after Tony and Brenda have breakfast there is a two-line parenthesis: “(These scenes of domestic playfulness had been more or less continuous in Tony and Brenda’s life for seven years.)” Whose voice is this, thus distinguished from the surrounding expository prose? It is Waugh, himself, filling in a bit of background, ignoring the modernist injunction, “show not tell.” And Waugh does a lot of “telling” in this novel, often clumsily, which is surprising given that the novel’s strongest technical virtuosity is otherwise its economy and spareness. A Handful of Dust is at its most accomplished and convincing when Waugh does the opposite of apostrophize and tells us virtually nothing: when what is implicit in the few words used detonates so much more effectively than any amount of elaborate explanation. I find Waugh’s manifest awkwardness with the omniscient voice perplexing — seeing it as evidence (with the aid of hindsight operating, I admit) of something hurried rather than fully or carefully considered. The opening of chapter three, “Hard Cheese on Tony,” almost reads like a parody of Dickens: “It is not uncommon at Brat’s Club, between nine and ten in the evening, to find men in white ties and tail coats sitting by themselves and eating, in evident low spirits, large and extravagant dinners.” The tone is avuncular, the overview authorial, the tense is present — and then it shifts back to the past tense for the arrival of Jock Grant-Menzies: “It was in this mood and for this reason that, one evening towards the middle of February, Jock Grant-Menzies arrived at the club.” This would not seem out of place in Trollope.
By dramatic contrast you then find passages as elliptical as this conversation between Tony and Brenda after Brenda has seen Beaver in London:
“Barnardo case?”
Brenda nodded. “Down and out,” she said, “sunk right under.” She sat nursing her bread and milk, stirring it listlessly. Every bit of her felt good for nothing.
“Good day?”
She nodded. “Saw Marjorie and her filthy dog. Bought some things. Lunched at Daisy’s new joint. Bone-setter. That’s all.”
“You know I wish you’d give up these day trips to London. They’re far too much for you.”
“Me? Oh, I’m all right. Wish I was dead, that’s all… and please, please, darling Tony, don’t say anything about bed, because I can’t move.”
Underneath these commonplace exchanges lurks the ticking time bomb: Brenda hasn’t mentioned Beaver. She hasn’t exactly lied, true, but we, the readers, will be hugely aware of the omission. It’s at this moment that we know for the first time she will have an affair with Beaver and will betray Tony. It is what is not said, what is left out, that makes these few lines function so effectively. But such skilful reticence isn’t consistent in the noveclass="underline" implicitness and explicitness coexist, often uneasily. This is not a sign of a writer exercising total mastery over his material.
Such signs are legion, however, in the passages leading up to the death of Tony and Brenda’s child John Andrew in a hunting accident. Before the fateful hunt Waugh uses a device that can only be called cinematic: a series of short scenes juxtaposed, sometimes no more than a few lines of dialogue, a method that, in a film, would be known as cross-cutting, or even, at its most rapid, montage. Again, it is the absence of interlinking passages that is conspicuous. Often the speakers of lines aren’t identified, neither is their location. Waugh was an avid cinema-goer and he doubtless realized that here was a method of moving narration along without the need for pages of expository prose. And such descriptive passages as there are demonstrate the old adage of “less is more” to near perfection:
She hit him and the horse collected himself and bolted up the road into the village, but before he went one of his heels struck out and sent John into the ditch, where he lay bent double, perfectly still.
Everyone agreed that it was nobody’s fault.
Terse, heavily monosyllabic, the words do their job with perfect thriftiness — and then the overused phrase “bent double” seems, at first, slack or lazy, until you realize, as you visualize exactly what the words describe, that there is no more expressive way of conveying the fact that John Andrew is actually dead. A little boy bent double in a ditch.
Sustained passages of brilliance like this can function as an ideal model of how to maintain narrative power. The pages that lead up to the death of John Andrew are a tour de force. But then you come across a section, such as the following, when Tony learns that Brenda is going to sue for heavy alimony.
He hung up the receiver and went back to the smoking room. His mind had suddenly become clearer on many points that had puzzled him. A whole Gothic world had come to grief… there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled …